Posts Tagged ‘sametime’

Lotus Notes/sametime has a spectacularly annoying default for their chat application that makes chat sessions modal by default. Not only that, but they are both modal and flashing until you click on the window.

Somebody told me how to disable this brain dead “feature” on facebook, and I’m sharing it here. You need to use File -> preferences -> sametime -> notifications, but once you are there what shows up is “Location awareness” :

You have to individually click on all the other options (like One-on-one) to actually disable the model and flashing nastiness. For example:

Once this is done, then sametime windows hide in the background where they should be, until you actually get around to looking at them, if you ever choose to.

When I started at IBM way too many years ago, there were three main forms of development communication:

email

phone

office drop by

Now there’s one more in the list, the ‘instant message’. We have a homegrown system called sametime, but it doesn’t differ significantly from any of the other well known chat systems like Windows Live Messenger or even facebook.

I personally find this sort of chat system very intrusive, and have converged on a protocol that is acceptable to me for dealing with them.

I don’t expect anybody else to answer in real time, and do not attempt to respond myself to any such message in real time. It is rare that I’ll wait around hovering over my keyboard while I see “XXX is typing”, so that I can reply, and don’t expect this of anybody else either. When or if I happen to notice the message, and if the time is convenient, I’ll look at it.

If I don’t answer, I expect that the sender will follow up in email if required.

If the message request says something without any technical content, like “hi”, “hello”, and so forth, I generally close it without response.

After sending any message to anybody else, I close my chat window. If they choose to answer it at some point, then it reappears with their response.

With many people working remotely these days, the instant messaging system does often work better than a phone call, and it is great for sharing text with less delay than email, but I think it is generally unrealistic to expect any sort of interactive response in the workplace when using such a chat system, because you have no idea what else the person at the other end is doing.